


Symphony in E, For Two Souls

by recoveringrabbit



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Academy Era, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Sci-Ops Era (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), musical soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-15
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-08 19:52:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8858623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recoveringrabbit/pseuds/recoveringrabbit
Summary: Your song is yourself, the musical manifestation of your character and dreams and abilities and potential. It plays in your head at all times. You can share it with anyone you like, but doing so hands the other person complete knowledge of your intimate self.
But, if you're lucky, you find the person with whom your song blends, and that's what's called soulmates.





	1. The First Movement

After living with it for the last seventeen years, Jemma had become so accustomed to her soul song that she rarely even noticed it anymore. That was common, she understood. Your song was yourself, the musical manifestation of your character and dreams and abilities and potential. Did one regularly think about the color of one’s eyes or the sound of one’s voice? Only if one was a narcissist. Jemma could only recall hearing it a handful of times in the last decade or so: her first matriculation, the offer from SHIELD. It nearly always sounded louder on the verge of change. The long bowstrokes of a cello ushered in a quick, bright flight of violins and, with it, something that inevitably presented her with a course-defining opportunity.

So when the music nearly drowned out the soft Scottish voice from the back of the lecture hall, she took notice.

Turning around in her seat, she scanned the rows looking for the speaker. Her eyes lit on him just as he finished: Leopold Fitz, engineering, according to the SHIELD orientation packet she had spent the last month memorizing. She had paused at his picture for a long time, a squirmy feeling in the pit of her stomach; the image had been very bad, but hadn’t been able to hide his youth. _She_ was accustomed to be the only infant prodigy in the room and wasn’t sure quite what to do with someone equally young and possibly equally intelligent. Listening to him now, she mentally removed the _possibly_. What he was saying was _extremely_ clever, if limited in scope. Obviously, the thing to do was to join forces.

“Good,” the agent in charge of the orientation said. “Does anyone have a response to Cadet Fitz?”

Jemma’s hand shot up. “I think he’s right to say that we should expect the future of the sciences to be driven by technology, but he neglects to consider the way non-organic advancements are and have been for many years aping processes and attributes that organic materials evolved millions of years ago. To ignore that aspect would severely retard our progress.”

“Another good point, Cadet Simmons. All our surveillance devices, for example, are only making up for things the human body is much better suited for. Excellent. Moving on…”

As he continued, she peeked over her shoulder at Cadet Fitz. That had gone rather nicely, she thought; she had displayed her knowledge while acknowledging his decent point, which was the basis for commonality and connection. Maybe she could catch him after class and continue the discussion. Have a proper cup of tea. But when she caught his eye and smiled, he looked deliberately away. Prickled, she turned back to face the front. Just because she had gotten an “excellent” while he received a mere “good” was no reason to be shirty.

She meant to let the matter go. She really did. But on her way out of the hall she heard the violins again, and she looked up and he was within arms’ length and she had to try, didn’t she? “Cadet Fitz!”

He stopped, fidgeting with the straps of his backpack and hardly meeting her eyes. As she came up beside him she forgot what she was going to say for a half-second, discomfited by the difference between the idea of him she had created in her head and the actual shape of his face and color of his eyes. Oh, his picture hadn’t done him justice. Recovering, she extended a handshake. “I’m Jemma Simmons. It’s Leopold, isn’t it? Or do you prefer Leo?”

“Fitz,” he said, dropping her hand like she had spit in it. She felt her smile falter, but pressed on.

“I wanted to introduce myself. What you said in there—”

“Wrong, apparently.” He stared fixedly at a spot on the ground.

“Incomplete?” she offered instead. “I just thought, since you’re an engineer, you might not be considering all the angles. I was going for tea—can we—maybe—”

“Sorry, I can’t,” he said, and turned tail and ran, actually ran, into the crowds filling the corridor. Jemma stood and watched him, one hand grasping her other wrist over her pulse point. That was that, then, she thought as she decrescendoed to _pianissimo_. He didn’t want to talk to her. Her song had been wrong.

But he kept popping up in her labs and lectures with his accent like home and his brain like a machine and his hands flying at the speed of sound and every single time she thought _well, maybe once more_. At first she tried building on his comments, adding her different knowledge to his. Then she tried polite questions. Then outright challenges. Nothing ever gained her more than a one- or two-word response directed somewhere above her head, as if she was utterly beneath his attention. So be it. By the end of the semester, she had come to the conclusion that she heard her music more clearly when he was around because he was meant to be her nemesis, defining her by his contradiction. And that was fine with her. It really was.

* * *

 

Fitz slouched into chem lab and swallowed a groan. The oh-so-familiar trill of the clarinet echoed in his head expectantly, signifying that _she_ was here—Jemma Simmons, the only person he had ever met who was smarter than he was and the one person he couldn’t manage to string together a complete sentence for. In _front_ of, yes. He could talk at length as long as it wasn’t directly to her. But let her top his point with an equally (or more) brilliant one of her own and he was left gaping like a fish. Heck, let him get a tiny glimpse of her and everything flew out of his mind; even the back of her shining head made him flustered. All he wanted to do was impress her, just once. Beyond that he couldn’t go.

Dr. Hall bounced into the room excitedly, clapping for attention. “Let’s get started, lots to cover. First things first: partners.”

Fitz doodled on a scrap of paper, listening idly. With no one else at his bench, it seemed likely his partner would move to join him, making it unnecessary for him to pay attention. The idea he had playing at the edge of his mind seemed more urgent. Until, that is, an irritated “ahem” made the _oh crap_ bassoon go off in his head and he looked up to the angry, wary eyes of Jemma Simmons. “It’s a good thing one of us was listening,” she said, hugging her books to her chest.

He half-started to his feet, a leftover courtesy drilled into him by his mother. The clarinet burst into bloom. “I. Um.”

She didn’t wait for a response. “I don’t suppose you were paying enough attention to know what we’re doing?”

“Acid tests.” He hadn’t been, but Dr. Hall had told him in their mentor meeting a few days earlier. “We’ve, um, got to test the efficacy of various solvents in ameliorating the acidic effect—try to turn them into bases if possible, but at least avoid the reaction.”

“That’s right.” She almost looked disappointed. “Well, you’re not a chemist, are you? And I am, so I’ll lead, all right.”

It wasn’t a question and he was more than happy to defer to her, so he held the beakers and maintained the heat and noted the results in silence for an hour, his song blaring too loudly to even try to come up with something clever enough to say. Nor could he remember any of the opening salvos he had plotted out as he lay awake at night. Something about her—her bright smile, her genuine kindness, her obvious brilliance—created a vacuum where his cognitive ability usually resided. He had to try, though. They could be friends, he knew they could, if only he could show her.

About halfway through the lab, Dr. Hall stopped by their bench. Fitz noticed smugly that other groups had already received multiple check-ins. “My two favorite mentees! How is it going?”

“Solvents one and two are entirely inert,” Simmons said briskly, not taking her attention from her careful pipette work. “Solvent three, which I judge to be a member of the alkali family, had some effect but only when we first treated it with a solution of…” Frowning, she appeared to be reaching for the name from her sloppy notes. With a glance at his neat ones, he quickly located the formula they had used and supplied it. Simmons gave him a sharp look from the corner of her eye and continued. “And modulated to a temperature of 87 degrees Celsius.”

“But it began to react negatively at 89 degrees,” he added, “which might have been due to the added solution rather than solution three itself.”

“And how would you counteract that problem?” Dr. Hall asked, looking between them.

“Add water.”

For a split second Fitz wasn’t sure if he had actually spoken or if she had somehow managed to pull the thought from his head. Then he caught her wide-eyed surprise and realized he must have, that they had reached the same conclusion and voiced it in the same instant. Dr. Hall pursed his lips, considering. “”An unorthodox method, to be sure, but simple and straightforward. And effective. I might even go so far as to say brilliant. Well done, cadets!” He rubbed his hands together. “Why has no one put you two together before? If there were two people more likely to be in tune I don’t know who they’d be. Carry on. You might be on to something.” And he moved on, leaving Fitz and Simmons to stare at each other blankly. Fitz’s mind raced. In tune? He had never gone so far in his wildest dreams. In tune was one step away from soulmate harmonies. At _most_ he had hoped they might be in the same key.

“Well,” she said finally, “I doubt that. I’ve got some accidentals that throw everyone off.” Fitz did as well, but as he made a habit of keeping his song to himself he didn’t offer that information. She took a deep breath and he watched something struggle across her face before she spoke again. “I didn’t know you were Dr. Hall’s other mentee. He’s told me you were working on something interesting with adamantium…”

“Yeah. Uh, yeah.” He put a hand on the back of his neck, hoping to hide the blush he could feel creeping up it. “It’s just theoretical right now, we can’t get our hands on anything more than shavings, but I think we might be able to treat it to withstand sub-zero temperatures.”

He did not think he imagined the interest in her eyes. “When you say ‘treat’ did you mean on an atomic level? Because I’ve often thought the covalent bonds could be fortified if one did just a little playing. Could you hand me what we’ve got of solvent three?”

Pushing it over to her, he shook his head. “I was thinking more like a film or a glue. Only—”

“—adamantium won’t accept it.”

“Right,” he breathed, wondering if she was actually magic enough to read his mind or if, by some miracle, Dr. Hall could be right. “Um. Do you need another pipette?”

“Yes, thank you. So how are you getting around it?”

“Making an alloy.”

“That seems—”

“—counterintuitive, yeah, but the film will make up in strength what the metal loses. This is hot enough now.”

By the end of the class they’d forced solution three to play nicely with both acids and bases and she’d almost managed to convince him atomic manipulation had the best chance of solving his cling-film problem. By the end of the semester, they hadn’t succeeded (yet) in making adamantium cold proof, but they had invented a new kind of superglue and begun answering to the combined moniker FitzSimmons. Fitz still heard the clarinets when she walked in the room, but he learned to associate them with possibility rather than panic.


	2. The Second Movement

The longer they worked together, the better they were. That was a fact. Jemma accepted it without questioning. Perhaps there was a bit of superstition there—trying to qualify it might just muck it up—but mostly it was because there was no need to question it. From the very first moment in chem lab they had slid into partnership as easily as a bow slides from G to D, arguing and agreeing by turn and between them building something exponentially greater than they could have done alone. It wasn’t just professional, either. Over the interminably long summer hols, she had been surprised to find herself at loose ends without his presence. The weekly calls and near-daily emails did very little to change the fact that she was missing something important.

“Perhaps you ought to have your song recorded again,” her mother suggested after the third week. “You’ve been through a lot of changes this year; maybe it’s different enough you’re ill-tempered.”

“Only situationally,” she said. Soul songs didn’t change, at least not merely because one moved or attended a new school or missed one’s best friend. So she bore the loneliness until mid-August when she met Fitz at Heathrow for the flight back and was suddenly aware of the delicate thread of a flute piping up around measure seventeen. That was new, she thought as he wolfed his way through three packets of crisps. At least, it couldn’t be new, because it fit like it had always been there, but it was _like_ new.

She thought about that flute sometimes over the next year. Not often, because there were too many other things occupying her attention, but sometimes, when they were pulling an all-nighter in the lab or she found one of his equations squared up in the blank spaces of her notes or he handed her a perfectly made mug of tea just when she was about to fall over, she would remember the muted months and worry. Nothing had ever been as simple as her and Fitz. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing it. At least, she consoled herself, there was another two years at the Academy.

And then suddenly there wasn’t. Neither she nor Fitz noticed that the extra classes they were taking to keep busy had slowly turned into a whole year’s worth of work and they were on the very verge of graduation—the youngest cadets ever, two nineteen-year-olds with a million questions and next-to-no answers. Jemma found herself listening to her recording more than she ever had, trying desperately to draw strength from it. Her song could be relied upon to give her the necessary courage to face whatever came next, confident in her own powers to make her life be what she wanted. It didn’t work, though. Not this time. Every replay just made her more anxious.

She finally realized what was wrong one night as she and Fitz sprawled across her floor eating popcorn out of the packet and blasting through their joke of a homework assignment: the flute was missing. Of course her song couldn’t give her confidence; it was lacking a part of her self. She pushed onto her knees and wrung her hands. How could she view the future with equanimity when she didn’t know what it entailed for the best partnership, the best friendship she had ever enjoyed? “Fitz,” she said. “Has anyone spoken to you about what’s going to happen next?”

Brow furrowed in concentration, he didn’t look up from his notebook. “After atomistic attributes? Common compounds and their properties—not that that will be any more difficult than this, but—”

“Ugh, Fitz, no. After _this_. After we graduate.”

“Oh.” His eyes when they met hers were wary and a bit confused. “No. Not to me. Have they…did they talk to you about it?”

Her breath escaped in a whoosh of relief. “No, nothing. And that’s odd, isn’t it? They must have plans for us; they knew we would be graduating before we did. I can’t imagine it’s caught them off guard.”

“They’ll tell us when we need to know. The answer to number twelve is fourteen, right?”

“Of course.” She bit her lip, comforted but not enough to let it go now that she had been brave enough to begin. “But, you do think they’ll put us together, don’t you?”

“Of course.” He echoed her words but not her expression, giving her that potent mix of _I’m confused why you’re saying that_ and _are you mental_ that was usually confined to the lab. “It’ll probably be SciOps, you know, Simmons. There’s not a lot of places you can go when you don’t pass your field assessments.”

He was right, of course, and she tried to draw comfort from his unconcern. Only there were _several_ places one could be sent if one didn’t pass one’s field assessments, and even two was one too many for her emotional stability. Lying awake for the third night in a row, she decided to take matters into her own hands. The next morning she made an appointment with Agent Weaver.

The dean, whose command and poise were legendary, had always rather intimidated Jemma. In purely scientific matters she knew she could hold her own, but anything personal turned her into a stammering, giggling, star-struck teenager that Jemma found, frankly, rather embarrassing. To that end, she had prepared a detailed speech and a stack of notecards laying out her case. With the weight of evidence behind her, Agent Weaver _had_ to agree. When the moment came, however, her song nearly deafened her and it was all she could do to squeak out, “I must be assigned to work with Fitz. It’s very important that we stay together.”

Agent Weaver’s perfect eyebrows rose slowly up her forehead. “Really, Cadet Simmons, I don’t think it’s the junior agent’s place to demand anything.”

“No, of course not.” Jemma subsided, chastened, until the flute picked up again. “Only I really think it’s in SHIELD’s best interests—we work so much better together—”

“You’re equally brilliant apart.”

“That’s not true. We need each other to do our best work. Every—” She stopped, the truth finding its way out in spite of her. “Well, _most_ , anyway, of our achievements have been the direct result of our collaboration. Yes, you could separate us, but then we’d only be much-better-than-average scientists as opposed to the ground-breaking force we are now. Our best work is still ahead of us, Agent Weaver!”

The dean leaned forwards in her seat, clasping her hands at the edge of her desk. “Well. That’s a very impassioned plea. Unfortunately, Cadet Simmons, we only take into consideration need and aptitude in assigning placements. Sometimes when we have two agents who display exceptionally high tunefulness—”

“Fitz and I do!”

She wasn’t sure where the words had come from. They certainly weren’t in her notes—she had honestly never given a beat’s consideration to the matter—but it must be true. The ease with which they worked, the way they finished each others’ thoughts, the fundamental likemindedness on issues big and small—surely all that meant they shared at least _some_ musical qualities. It _must_.

“Do you?” Agent Weaver frowned and reached for the file on her desk. “You declined to state on your enlistment paperwork.”

“Yes, I agreed to give my professional life to SHIELD, not my soul.”

Weaver left that alone. “Cadet Fitz…I’m not sure about him.”

“Well, I am.” Jemma lifted her chin. “I know him a good deal better than anyone here, I think. But perhaps you could ask Dr. Hall? He paired us; he mentors us; he said he’d never seen two people more likely to be in tune.” God bless Dr. Hall. Agent Weaver had to listen to him.

Agent Weaver stood, a clear dismissal. “Thank you, Cadet Simmons. I will take this into consideration.”

Fitz was waiting for her on a bench outside, eating something as always. Spotting her, he swallowed hastily. “How’d it go? Did she tell you?”

“No.” She collapsed on the bench beside him. “I’m rather afraid…”

“Of what?”

Of being without you, she thought. “I may have lied to her.”

“How?” he asked, smirking.

“I don’t know…Fitz, do you ever think—have you ever—I mean, we must be in tune, mustn’t we?” She twisted her hands together in her lap, unable to look at him. Soul songs were so private, so personal; she felt nearly as if she had walked in on him showering. She’d almost _rather_ do that. A covert glance his direction caught him tugging on his earlobe, the blush he could never control spreading to every bit of pasty skin. And this, she thought, was why she had never thought about it before. “Never mind. We don’t have to talk about it. In fact, let’s not.”

He cleared his throat, shaking his head fiercely. “No, it’s—well, um, Simmons, yeah, we must. Something, at least, or everything we know about the songs isn’t true. Dunno if it’s key or tempo or meter, but we can’t be this good and not have something. Right?”

Slumping back against the seat, she did her best to remain collected. “And that’s what I told Weaver. She said they, um, might not assign us together unless we were highly in tune so I—”

“Lied,” he finished for her.

“Said something I didn’t know for sure was true. But as long as we both think so, they can’t know any different, can they?”

“I declined to state on my paperwork.” He shuffled his feet against the gravel. “And they’re legally prohibited from asking. We don’t have to share with anyone we don’t want to. So we’re probably safe.”

And together, which was infinitely the most important thing. “Well, good. I mean, if it was play my song for you or be separated I would, but if we don’t have to—”

“No, yeah.” He nodded soberly, staring at the ground. She wondered what he was thinking. Then he popped up and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Dinner?”

Rolling her eyes, she clambered to her feet. “You just ate.”

“Pre-dinner snack. I’ve got plenty of room. Can you believe what Drimmer said in Xeno today? What an idiot.”

They fell into step easily, wending their way through campus to the commissary without a pause in their incredulous dismay at the extreme stupidity of their compatriot. Jemma felt her hands unclenching as they talked. Her nerves were, of course, silly; if they were in tune they would remain in tune whether they acknowledged it or not. There was no reason to think things would suddenly change. Not that she wanted things to change, anyway. She wanted it to be just like this for always. That was what this whole thing was about, wasn’t it?

He reached the door first and reached out for the handle, but paused without opening it. Not paying attention, she nearly rammed into it before looking up at him irritably.

“If it was let me listen to your song or be separated,” he asked quietly. “You would, um, you would—to stay with me?”

“Yes.”

She wasn’t sure if he was more surprised by her answer or she was more surprised at the ease with which it came. But she would, of course, whatever it took. When he had taken such a place of permanence in her life she didn’t know, but there he was, the steady beat of the _basso continuo_ she needed to keep her tempo balanced. Yes, she would do anything to not be separated from him.

“Well,” he said finally. “Me too.”

“Good.”

They received their assignments four days later: SciOps. Different floors, different SOs, but the same place. Jemma breathed more easily and had a new recording made to celebrate the new chapter of their— _her_ new life.

 

* * *

 

“Come on, man. You must know something.”

Fitz looked across the booth at her and grimaced, rubbing his shoulder where Mendoza had rammed into it. “First, if Simmons doesn’t want to tell you I absolutely won’t. Second, why would I know anything? Do you know anything about your lab partner’s soul song?”

Jacobs, just back from picking up their latest round of drinks, slid the pints around the booth and tossed her braid over her shoulder. “No, but I haven’t been with my lab partner for five years. And I don’t live with her, either.”

“Six years,” they corrected in unison. Jemma took a swig of her beer to hide from the significant glances Jacobs and Mendoza exchanged and immediately regretted it. Why did she drink this rotten stuff, anyway? “Not that it makes a difference,” she said, trying to move on. “Is it true that Martin’s working on a carabineer? Is that for SHIELD or to give him an excuse to go climbing?”

Mendoza, as always, refused to be deterred. “Because I’ve got this friend, great guy, totally cool, but he got his heart broken by a dissonant tune and I don’t want to open him up to it again.”

Another blind date? Jemma sighed heavily. When would SciOps realize she was perfectly happy as she was? “Just because your friend over-shares doesn’t mean I will. If Fitz doesn’t even know—”

“But Fitz would know his.” Mendoza turned to him expectantly. “Come on, man, help a bro out.”

Fitz scowled, poking at the ice in his soda with the end of his straw. “Shut up, Mendoza. It’s not your business or mine.”

She shot him a grateful glance and there the matter rested until Jacobs had excused herself for the night and Mendoza had gotten himself well and truly pie-eyed. As they stood on the curb waiting for Mendoza’s taxi to arrive, the other agent threw his arm over Fitz’s shoulders, the beery gusts of his breath hitting Jemma even where she stood at Fitz’s other side. “It’s me, okay. I’m my friend. Can’t you give me one teeny, tiny clue? Since you osbivosly”—he stopped, started again—“obviously don’t notice how amazing Simmons is—”

“I notice,” Fitz said. Then, sighing, he shrugged off Mendoza. “Look, I can’t say anything about Simmons, okay? We’ve never been played in concert. But—B-flat.”

Jemma sucked in a silent gasp and instinctively flung out a hand for balance. Had the world shifted on its axis? It seemed possible. Any impossibility was, if Fitz was B-flat. Anything was, if they weren’t in tune after all.

The cab pulled up as Mendoza’s face crumpled. “I’m C. That’ll never work.”

“Nope.” Fitz opened the door and managed to sling Mendoza inside, halfway in the backseat to buckle him before she had a chance to do more than open her mouth. “Besides, if she was interested in you she would have sat next to you instead of making me do it, you ninny. Learn to read the signs. And maybe talk to _her_ instead of me.” Giving the driver Mendoza’s address, he slammed the door and came back to stand beside her as she blankly watched the taxi drive off. She put the keys into his hand wordlessly and stalked towards their car, leaving him to follow. Her head was too loud for talk.

They were halfway home before the frantic violins got to be too much and the words spilled out in spite of her. “We’re not in tune, Fitz.”

His hands stopped drumming on the wheel and he braked at the stop sign faster than was strictly necessary. “What do you mean? Course we are. We’ve always been.”

“No, we aren’t.”

“Simmons, we are.”

“No, Fitz—” Her wretched voice cracked and she clenched her fist tighter. “If you’re B-flat we _aren’t_ , because I’m not. I’m not B-anything. And if we aren’t in the same key, being the same tempo or meter or time signature is essentially irrelevant. And if we aren’t in tune—”

“Simmons.” She recognized his relieved laugh, the quick sound that was more a noisy breath than anything else. “Do not scare me like that again. Of course I’m not B-flat.”

“Not B-flat,” she repeated, unsure how many times the world could leap up in the air and come down again differently in one night.

He sent her a gently mocking smirk as he flicked on the turn indicator. “Not B-anything. Do you think I would tell Mendoza, of all people, what key I’m in? I just wanted to get him off our back.”

“I did think it was a little strange that you would tell him when you’ve never told me,” she said slowly, logic trickling back from wherever it had fled to. “We’ve always agreed that it’s—”

“Private, yeah. But he wasn’t going to let up, so I threw him a false trail.”

“You could have been wrong.”

“Simmons, really,” he said, “everyone knows Mendoza’s a C. He practically introduces himself with it.” His eyes widened. “Unless you wanted to go out with him and I mucked it up?”

“Ugh, Fitz, no. He’s most _definitely_ not my type.”

“No? But he’s so well-formed and symmetrical.”

“Shut up.”

He made an obvious point of closing his mouth and turned his attention back to the road, leaving her to process. What exactly she was processing she didn’t know; things had simply returned to the status quo, hadn’t they? Still, she couldn’t help but feel unsettled. Perhaps it was just the uncertainty. It was never entirely easy to have one’s underlying assumptions challenged. She wondered if it had ever occurred to Fitz, that they might not—but it couldn’t have, or he wouldn’t be so sure. She wished she could have his certainty.

“Anyway,” he said finally, “key signature isn’t everything.”

She sighed, leaning her head against the seat. “I don’t understand the fascination with telling people. It’s an unhealthy shortcut to intimacy. Just because you’re in the same key doesn’t mean you’ll be good for each other or work well together; you have to build it up, don’t you? And if you work at it enough you can get on with nearly anyone.”

“ _You_ could. Not everyone.”

“But you know what I mean.”

“Yes, but you’re being inconsistent.”

Used to his intellectual critiques, she didn’t take offence. “Where?”

He pulled into their parking space and switched off the car, turning to face her. “Simmons, you were just in a state of panic because you thought we weren’t—”

“I was not in a state of panic!” she protested, face growing warm.

“—yes, you were, I haven’t seen you that tense since you thought you mislabeled those petri dishes—weren’t in tune, but that’s directly the opposite of your theory. Either you’re letting your personal feelings overcome the correct interpretation of the results or you’re just being inconsistent.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head, “it’s different. You and I are different than just co-workers or friends. People don’t get married without being _at least_ in tune and preferably harmonic—”

He looked away quickly. “We’re not married. We’re not even—”

“Yes, but we’re more than those other things too. Fitz, you’re my best friend in the world.”

The words resonated through the car, hanging in the air and snaking their way through her ensemble. The violins picked them up, the flute, the cellos bowed them until she wondered how she hadn’t heard them there before. _My best friend in the world_. She swallowed, tucking her hair behind her ear. Why was she finding it hard to meet his eyes? She had only stated the truth.

He cleared his throat. “So you’re saying that level one relationships, as it were, aren’t dependent on soul songs, but deeper relationships are?”

No response to her declaration, then. Just back to the hypothesis at hand. Blinking away her disappointment, she nodded. “Because of the depth of soul shared. I can get on with Mendoza because we don’t have to connect at any kind of real level. I couldn’t ever be with him more than this because we’re fundamentally dissimilar. That’s why married people want to harmonize—they’re sharing their whole souls. If they were dissonant—” She stopped when she saw his mouth tighten. “Well, you know what happens then.”

They both fell silent, thinking of the many couples they had known who insisted soul songs didn’t matter only to flame out spectacularly. It was impersonal for her, but Fitz had seen it in his own home.

“But we,” she said, staring through the windshield, “we’re the same. At least, I always thought we were the same.”

“We _are_ the same.” He reached out and covered her fist, stroking his thumb across her knuckles. Her heart stuttered in her chest. She couldn’t remember the last time Fitz had initiated physical contact. “You’re my best friend in the world too, Jemma, and you will be whatever our songs are like.” Taking a deep breath, he squeezed her hand. “E. 6/8. _Allegro_.”

If her heart had stuttered before, now it was outright speechless. Tears sprang to her eyes without permission and she was grateful for the darkness of the car. “Me too,” she said. “All those. It’s an ensemble, not a band. Classical.”

“Me too,” he said. “See? We’re good.”

“Good.”

The silence enveloped them and it wasn’t silent at all, but full. Something was thrumming, buzzing, singing—it wasn’t her, but it was, but it was something else, something more. If she didn’t know it was impossible to hear someone else’s song, she would have thought—but it was, of course. Jemma looked down at their hands and tried to steady her breathing. Was he hearing this, too?

Then he yelped, complaining loudly about how cold her hands were, and the moment broke in the middle of a phrase. She fell on his comment with rather more heat than it deserved, resulting in a good-natured tiff that lasted all the way upstairs. Jemma felt, on the whole, rather relieved. In the impersonal light of the lift and hallway, it seemed more reasonable and less dramatic that she and Fitz had finally confirmed their long-held hypothesis. Yes, it was significant that he had entrusted her with the information, but he had trusted her with his pin code a long time ago. They were best friends. Best friends knew these kinds of things.

The strain of oddly-familiar music had vanished, as well, so there was nothing to indicate that anything of note had happened. So she put it aside, wrapping it up like a Christmas ornament to be brought out at the proper moments.

One thing still niggled, though. Long after they had said good night, she crept to his room and knocked softly. “Fitz? Still up?”

“Come in.”

He was sitting on the bed in a round circle of light, journal in hand and an uncapped pen in his mouth. “Sitting?” he mumbled around it.

She shook her head and leaned against the jamb. “I was only wondering: why B-flat?”

His eyebrows drew together briefly. “Well, B-flat’s the key the universe—”

“Resonates in,” she said with him, and he nodded.

“I just thought, if for some reason you weren’t E like me, you’d be B-flat. Like the universe. It suits you.”

“I harmonize with the cosmos?”

He offered a half-smile. “Yes.”

Jemma pressed her lips together, hoping to hide the wide smile she felt creeping through her chest. It didn’t quite work, but well enough that she thought he might not know that was the nicest compliment she had ever received. “Good night, Fitz.”

“Good night.”


	3. The Third Movement

Fitz jerked the keys from the lock so hard they fell from his hand and onto the floor. Rather than waste time retrieving them, he merely kicked them inside as he swung his bag from his shoulder and called out, hoping he sounded less panicked than he felt. “Simmons! Are you here? Why aren’t you answering your phone?” No response. The lights were all off; her shoes weren’t resting on the mat; the kitchen was dark and cold with their breakfast dishes still soaking in the sink. He leaned against the wall, panting, terrified. Where was she? He _knew_ he should have gone with her. Now she’d disappeared, who knew where, or been kidnapped or something—she was brilliant enough that any number of evil organizations would be after her—

Then he heard music and muffled sobbing on the other side of the wall, and his heart resumed beating _andante_. Heaving a sigh of relief, he let the tension drain from his shoulders and knocked on the wall. “Simmons, I’m here. Do you need tea?”

She didn’t answer, which he found very alarming. “Simmons? Are you all right?”

When more sobs were the only response, he accelerated into crisis mode. Simmons didn’t cry, not like this; if she couldn’t even ask for tea something was very, very wrong. Without pausing to take off his shoes, he went directly to her room and entered without knocking, not wanting to put even the pressure to respond on her. She would want him. She shouldn’t be alone.

The room was full to the brim with whatever she was listening to, so lush and evocative he almost felt like he was swimming through it to reach her. Apart from that he paid it no mind. If the shaky breaths weren’t enough, the fountain of a messy ponytail springing up from behind the edge of her bed gave away both her location and her mental state and told him he needed to be there, stat. Making his way to the bed, he sat on the foot with his legs beside her and placed a hand on her shoulder. Words were, as always, unnecessary. The best thing he could do was help hold her together if she needed to fall apart.

“He didn’t want to hear,” she said finally, her face buried in the denim by his knee. “I went through the whole presentation, all forty minutes of it, all six months of work, and when I got to the end he only asked me what _you_ thought we could do with it.”

“Me?” he repeated, sure he hadn’t heard her right. “What have I got to do with it?”

“Which is what I said, and then he _sneered_ , Fitz, and said if you weren’t involved he wasn’t interested.”

Fitz called him a few choice names, rubbing her arm gently. “What’s his opinion? He’s a washed-up, hide-bound hack anyway.”

She laughed damply. “No, Fitz, he isn’t. He’s a genius and a pillar of the discipline and what he says matters.”

“If he can’t see how brilliant your theory is—”

“ _Is_ it?” Her voice cracked.

He slid from the bed to sit beside her, wrapping her more closely into his side as she pulled her hands to her chest and tried to curl into herself. “Of _course_ it is.”

“You’re biased.”

Yes, he was, absolutely, but also— “Have I ever lied to you about science? No. And I say your theory is brilliant and he’s an idiot if he thinks it’s worthless because it lacks practical application. Knowledge is always worthwhile.”

“That’s true.” She sniffled, wiping her cheeks. “And my work is worthwhile without yours too, isn’t it? I know it’s _better_ when we work together but if God forbid something happened or if we had never met, I could still—”

“Of _course_ ,” he said again, fighting off a desire to storm into that bastard’s office and throttle him. How dare he make Simmons—the kindest, smartest, best person in the world and probably the galaxy—doubt herself like this? She was marvelous, miraculous. _He_ was the lucky one to work with and be inspired by her. Surely she knew that. Maybe he had never told her, per se, but he also hadn’t realized he would have to. She always seemed so confident in her abilities. In their eight years of friendship he had never seen her like this. Not sure how to handle it, he just started talking: “You could do whatever you wanted and have it be great even if I was never born. You’re not one of those pathetic people who have to wait around for someone to fill in the other half of their song, you’ve got a whole symphony with those tricky chord progressions that blow people’s minds—”

She stopped him with one raised eyebrow. “No I haven’t. Aren’t you listening?”

“To myself?”

“Ugh, Fitz.” She rolled her eyes and waved a hand in the air. “To _me_. Does this sound like a symphony with chord progressions to you?”

Fitz suddenly became aware again of the music filling the room and started away from her, elbows and knees at odds. “This is you. Your song. I should—um, I’m sorry—”

Grabbing his hand, she kept him from leaping to his feet. “Stay, Fitz. If I didn’t want you here I would have said so earlier.”

“But it’s your song,” he said desperately. “We’ve never—”

“Now we have. You know it anyway.” Her eyes were deep pleading pools. “Listen with me, please.”

So he did, putting his head into his hands to better concentrate (certainly not to avoid her face as she willingly bared her soul to him). It wasn’t necessary, though—the truth was, she was right. Fitz felt the music as a lump in his chest, the shape and sound of her more familiar than his own limbs; he heard the notes and recognized them as if he had known them his whole life. Sprightly and bright, deep and evocative, complicated and clever and gentle and sweet, every note and every rest was her. He hadn’t been paying attention earlier, or he would have known it the instant he stepped in the room.

He hadn’t been paying attention earlier, or he would have known she was already his favorite song.

He let her wash over him, hearing his realization in every chord and phrase, and asked himself only how he hadn’t figured it out before. Maybe it was understandable. They had been friends so long and so hard that he had more or less assumed everybody had an invisible cord attaching them to someone else, that his desire to be around her always and with her forever was normal. Normal! What an idiot he had been. Tunefulness explained natural affinity and compatibility and that was _all_ —even their matching key signatures and tempos and styles only meant that they _could_ be very close. There was no requirement or guarantee that they _would_ be. You had to choose to listen. And they had—oh, they had, and he would listen to her again every single day for the rest of his life if she’d let him.  

A trumpet blared. Chest deep in Simmons, he spent a few befuddled bars trying to understand why a brass had suddenly appeared amidst her strings and delicate piping flutes before realizing that the sound originated internally, rather than from the iPod speaker on her desk. He had hardly been aware of his own song while he listened—enraptured by her, he didn’t care about himself—but the fanfare blasted through the haze, demanding his attention. Frowning, he refused to give it. His horns and winds muddled her music, brash intruders on her resonant phrases; playing in the same key at the same tempo, the songs sounded more like a shouting match than a symphony. _Shut up_ , he told himself fiercely, _I’m trying to hear her_ —

Oh no.

With a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, he closed his eyes and concentrated, hoping he had made a mistake. Maybe she was just in a quiet bit and he a loud one; maybe he could find a place—but no matter how he scrolled backwards and forwards through his mental music, he couldn’t make them match. If pitches came together, they were discordant. He zigged where she zagged, went fast where she went slow, blasted through her most beautiful bars and got lost in her furious bowing. Technically in tune or not, their songs would never play together in the mellifluous way lovers’ should. You didn’t need perfect pitch to know that. Without harmony, everything would fall to pieces—maybe not if they were less dissonant, but as it was— Wincing at a particularly discordant note, he wondered bitterly how they managed to work together at all. All those people all these years had been very, very wrong. Their amazing partnership had nothing to do with their soul songs at all.

But if they already managed to be best friends in spite of their songs, why couldn’t they be something different, too? Dimly, a long-ago conversation floated back on the slinky lament of an oboe: _you know what happens when married people are dissonant_. But why? he demanded of the universe at large. If they were enough the same to be friends and partners, why couldn’t they pursue another kind of relationship with equal success? If it was a choice to get on they could choose to be together regardless. He could love her if he wanted to. He _did_ love her, and had since long before he could place her pitches on a staff. He’d rather listen to her song than his own, anyway.

But no matter how resolutely he stuffed mutes in the bells of his horns and stopped his ears to anything not her, he couldn’t keep his own song from singing. Of course he couldn’t. Even if he wanted to, even for her, he couldn’t stop being himself—his brassy, demanding, overpowering self, who despite his best efforts drowned out the glorious soul of Jemma Simmons. It would never work. Either he would silence her or himself. He clenched his teeth and twisted his fingers into his hair, welcoming the ache of his scalp to distract from the one creeping out from his heart. If keeping his love quiet was the only way to let her keep singing, he’d die with it etched on his bones.

When the song reached its end, the final chord sustained until he didn’t know whether the echoing vibrations came from the speaker or his own head, she reached forward to press a button on the iPod before hugging her knees to her chest. “Well?”

He left his face where it was for a beat, trying to ensure none of the world-shattering conclusions he had come to over the course of the last fifteen minutes would show. She couldn’t suspect any of it: not his feelings, not the cacophony, not that their entire relationship rested on willpower and misunderstanding. He had to act like nothing had changed. And really, he thought bleakly, nothing had. She was brilliant and beautiful and he loved her, and they were the best friends in the world, but not soulmates. _Finale_.

“Fitz?”

The stricken sound of her voice brought him out of his tortured reverie like a _fortissimo_ chord. Her eyes peered over her knees from the center of a tiny ball of worry. “I’m sorry,” she said, her words muffled between her knees and arms, “it’s too much. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Hey, hey. No.” Nerve endings vibrating, he ducked to meet her gaze and gently tugged on her sleeve. “I’m glad you did. It was. . .my honor to hear you.”

“But you’re trying to be kind.”

“No!”

Her cheekbones appeared over her arm, squeezing her attempt to understand and wringing out hurt. “It’s all right, Fitz. I’d rather know the truth. It’s best you tell me, anyway.”

“So _listen_.” Getting up on his knees, he moved in front of her and put a hand on each of her elbows to pry them away from her face. Damply, she attempted a reassuring smile, but her straggling hair and puffy eyes would undo even a better effort. Even for someone who didn’t know her as well as he did. Sucking in a breath, he reached out without thinking to sweep a strand of hair behind her ear. It was satin under his fingertips, and her cheek where his thumb brushed it was silk. He wished he didn’t know that. “Jemma,” he said, relishing the melody, “you’re better than a Beethoven symphony. You don’t need me. Or—” He choked. “Or anybody else.”

Tucking her chin against her knees, she looked up at him through her lashes, eyebrows wavering between relief and disbelief. “Really?”

“Really.”

For a moment she just watched him, clearly weighing his words and actions to ascertain his veracity. Then, quick as a trill, she lunged forward and threw her arms around him, pressing her forehead into the side of his neck and puffing a sigh down his collar. “Thank you, Fitz.”

“Yeah,” he said, his arms tight around her and his thumb stroking her shoulder of his own volition, “But for what? ’m only saying the truth.”

“For being yourself. For always letting me be myself.” Pulling back to sit on her heels, she left her hands on his shoulder and looked at him seriously. “You know you don’t have to let me listen to you, don’t you? You can keep it private if you like. I don’t need to hear you to know you.”

“Yeah,” he said again, staring down at where their knees touched. “Maybe. But not today, okay? I’m a little tired.”

“If you like, or not at all. It’s all right. Do you want dinner? I bought a lasagna to celebrate—well, we won’t be celebrating now, but that’s no reason not to eat it. And there’s ice cream.”

“Sounds good.”

He managed a smile, he thought. With a quick squeeze of his shoulders, she darted forward and pressed a kiss to his cheek before unfolding her limbs and getting to her feet. “I’ll preheat the oven. And garlic bread?”

Shoving his hand under his leg so he wouldn’t be tempted to touch his tingling cheek, he nodded. “Of course.”

He never knew how he got through the rest of the night without cracking, somehow managing to toast to her colleague’s demise and bicker about their evening viewing and wash up side by side as though nothing had changed. Nothing _had_ , he told himself every time she wrinkled her nose or swung her hair over her shoulder or overrode his sentences with one of her own. And he almost made himself believe it. Until he went to bed and lay awake for hours, staring at the ceiling while a violin sung her name all through his winds and brass.

* * *

 

Unluckily for Fitz, the months following his discoveries almost seemed calculated by the cruel world to keep him from moving on. Love kept coming up like a leitmotif: first the rash of holiday engagements, then the month-long saccharine celebration of Valentine’s Day, then the weddings popping up like flowers in the spring. The weddings were the worst. He hadn’t been particularly gung-ho about them to begin with, but now he could barely get through one without wanting to be sick every time someone gushed about how beautiful it was when two songs became one. Playing hooky, though, was no better, because then Jemma would become Florence Nightingale and bring him tea and scold him into good behavior and let him choose whatever movie he liked, and he had to look at her in her dress-up clothes and worn-out slippers and somehow not blurt out how much in love with her he was. More than once he nearly did, but just in time the single violin, now joined by a viola, sang out to remind him why he couldn’t.

By the time the last wedding of the year rolled around at the end of June, he resorted to humming the new melodic line at particularly tense moments. Whenever he caught a glimpse of her from the corner of his eye, for example. When she shifted in the pew beside him and he caught a whiff of her perfume. When she accidentally bumped his knee under the table as she ruthlessly but sweetly dismantled the troglodyte trying to patronize her during the cocktail bit of the reception.

Jemma turned over her shoulder as the idiot walked away, one eyebrow raised quizzically. “What’s that you’re humming? It’s really lovely.”

His heart gave a leap before thudding back to bass clef. It didn’t matter if she liked his song. It didn’t change their dissonance. “Er, just something I heard around. I don’t know its name.” Personally, he called it Jemma’s Theme, but he could hardly say so.

“No, I don’t either. It sounds familiar, though.” She hummed a few bars pensively, then shook her head. “No, I can’t place it. Perhaps it just reminds me of something. Are you feeling all right, Fitz?”

“Of course!” he squawked, “why wouldn’t I?”

“Aside from the infestation of stomach bugs you’ve suffered this spring, you look a bit flushed.” She turned more fully in her chair to lean toward him, one hand coming up palm out. “Let me see.”

He ducked, knowing full well that if she put her hand on his forehead and stared at him with concerned eyes it would make an already difficult situation a hundred times worse. “I’m fine, Simmons. Look, the bride and groom are coming in.”

Shooting him a suspicious look, she nevertheless joined in the welcoming cheers and whoops with gleeful abandon. Fitz clapped less enthusiastically, grudgingly glad for their friend even if he also kind of hated his guts. Look at him, gesturing at his new wife like he couldn’t believe his luck; the nerve, to pull her into his arms like he never had to let go. The rotter. In the hush that fell over the room as the musicians tuned their instruments, Fitz wished desperately that just this once, they wouldn’t dance their first dance to their new soul song.

Of course they did. People always did. And of course it was perfect: two delicate pianos like a lullaby, a clarinet and an oboe, the _shh shh_ of a brush on a drum. Slowly they came together in the center of the floor, folding into each other until the lines between their bodies blurred, becoming one figure as their songs blended into one new composition. That was how soulmates sounded. Tears pricked at Fitz’s eyes despite his best efforts. Did they even know how lucky they were, to find and love someone who harmonized like that?

When the song ended and everybody took their seats for dinner, Jemma swiped a fierce finger under her eye. “Well, that’s this waterproof mascara failed. Do I look like a cat burglar?”

“No, you look nice.”

She bestowed a quick, grateful curve of her mouth upon him, then put her chin in her hand and resumed her thoughtful observation of the happy couple. “Have you ever heard a harmony so perfect, Fitz?”

“No,” he said honestly.

“I wouldn’t have expected it of Henson, to be honest,” she said, wrinkling her forehead and then her nose when he tried to shh her. “I suppose that’s what’s possible when your song’s so simplistic.”

He shot a look across the table, trying to remember if any of the people across the table were relatives. “Jazz isn’t simplistic.”

“No, but there’s a lot more options for things that fit. Haven’t you noticed all the best harmonies are in pieces with room for improvisation? You rarely hear a Bach-esque canon, for example; the pieces have to match too closely.”

“I haven’t noticed.” He scowled at the centerpiece so he wouldn’t have to look at the Hensons cooing at each other in the center of the floor. Irritation made him perhaps more honest than he usually would be. “I try not to listen. I hate this tradition, actually.”

“You do?” she asked, surprised.

“Yes,” he said fervently, “rubbing it in if the harmony’s good, awkward for everyone if it’s not. Remember Sattler’s wedding?”

They shuddered simultaneously, recalling with perfect clarity the uncomfortable three and a half minutes at their supervisor’s wedding where the newly married couple fought valiantly to keep time before giving up in the middle of a phrase. “That’s true,” she acknowledged, “but I disagree if the harmony is good. It’s lovely when it works, I think; my parents play their song on their anniversary, and I always love to hear it.” She would, he thought, since her parents were the epitome of relationship goals. He might be the romantic of their duo, but she had all the evidence. “All the same,” she said, “I don’t think I’ll do it if I ever get married. I’ve kept my song private all this time, why would I suddenly share it with everyone either of us knows just because of a silly tradition? It’s illogical. Much better to keep it between the two of us.”

“Er—” He choked, reaching for his water desperately. She didn’t mean it that way, she _couldn’t_ mean it that way, for God’s sake get _ahold of yourself_ — “Well—I—Simmons, have you noticed how underrepresented Ballistics is here? Looks like they’re still bitter about that funding. It was two years ago, you’d think they’d be willing to forgive and forget.”

Four or five expressions passed across her face, but the meal arrived before she could settle on one, and she snapped her napkin with a flick of her wrist and accepted his change of topic. “You know Ballistics, though. So quick to make decisions they can’t take back.”

Fitz eased into the familiar patterns of conversation with a sigh of relief. Inter-departmental smack-talk should keep them busy through the meal, after which they would mingle with their co-workers, congratulate the bride and groom, watch the cake cutting, and escape back home to eat brownies on their couch and watch something entirely unromantic— _Ocean’s Eleven_ , probably. Jemma had been listening to “Claire de Lune” lately. If all went according to plan, he could survive this wedding without more than the usual amount of difficulty, even if the love of his life (but not soulmate) had accidentally mentioned a hypothetical wedding between them. He had plenty of practice.

The excellent meal finished, he folded his napkin and started to shove back from the table. “Shall we make the rounds?”

Distractedly staring at something over his shoulder, she shook her head. “In a minute, Fitz.”

He sat obediently, pouring them each another glass of wine while he waited for the crease between her eyebrows to smooth out. Her brain never stopped working, he knew that, which meant anything that required her dedicated attention like this held an unusual weight. In such moments, his job was to support however necessary. In this moment, apparently, it was to fend off anyone making small talk and to stay close.

Their table emptied onto the dance floor with the rest of the room as the formal part of the evening ended and a pounding beat and obnoxious synthesizer ushered in the party. Fitz bore it as best he could for two songs before leaning forward to shout at her over the poor excuse for music. “Can I help you with anything, Simmons? Do you need a notebook or a calculator? Did you want to go to the lab?”

She turned to him, crease still present and a shadow of uncertainty in her eyes. “Fitz, are you worried you’ll never find anyone you harmonize with?”

“What?” He gaped at her, glad his glass was empty as he set it hastily down.

“I said—”

“I heard you,” he said hastily, feeling heat rushing to his face, “but I don’t understand—”

“Because I don’t know what you feel good harmony ‘rubs in’, except that you haven’t got it. Which is of course a common emotion at weddings, there’s no shame in it, but if so—”

“I’m not worried,” he said, but she merely pursed her lips skeptically. “I’m _not_ ,” he tried again, “because that suggests it’s something I think about, and I don’t. I don’t care about finding someone who harmonizes with me.”

“Because if you are, there are databases and things—I’d be happy to help if you like—”

“No!” He could think of nothing he’d like less than that. Even leaving aside his unequivocal, unabashed love for Jemma, he had sneaking suspicion that the only people who could harmonize with his complicated, assertive piece would be too simple and dull to interest him. Before her he had never considered finding a soulmate. Now he didn’t want anyone but her.

“All right.” She held up both hands in surrender. “I was only trying to help. There’s no reason to give way to your Scotch temper.”

“Wasn’t,” he growled, then relented under her eloquently arched eyebrow, fiddling with his unused salad fork. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to shout. I just—it’s not important to me. There’s no need for you to worry about it.”

“I used to, though.”

His head snapped up. “Worry about me?”

“Ugh, Fitz.” She rolled her eyes. “As though I don’t have enough to think about. No, worry about finding someone myself. The time signature alone, not to mention the accidentals—well, you’ve heard me, Fitz, you know. I wouldn’t be the easiest person to match.”

She turned delicately pink, ducking her head so her hair fell around her face. This was the first time either of them had referenced that day in the months since. Fitz, avoiding it with grim determination as part of his broader campaign to act as though nothing had changed, somewhat assumed she kept quiet from retroactive embarrassment. She had always been intensely private; no doubt she regretted sharing as soon as she had time to think about it. He hadn’t offered his song either, afraid she would feel uncomfortable and terrified of what she might hear. Scooting his chair closer, Fitz resisted the desire to feel the soft strands again and spoke as quietly as the caveman music would allow him. “You’re not still worried about that, are you? Because your song’s magnificent.”

“Thank you, Fitz.” Without looking up, she found his hand and covered it with hers. Her theme drowned out his main melody, and he couldn’t look away. “That’s what—well, I thought if _you_ thought—what I mean is, if I don’t _need_ anybody, why worry about finding someone? That’s how people end up settling for poor harmonies, and I don’t want that. I want someone who makes me richer or no one at all.”

He hadn’t know he was holding out hope until it disappeared into oblivion on the downward glissando of his bassoon, leaving a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach and an utter inability to meet her eyes. Idiot. He couldn’t be with her even if she would be willing to try, even if she would be willing to try with him—they would drown each other out, not make each other better. He knew that as well as the laws of thermodynamics or the circle of fifths. But apparently some secret part of him still thought maybe, someday, perhaps—well, that was all done with now. This was all they would ever be, and he needed to pull himself together and learn to live with it. Still not looking away from her hand on his, he cleared his throat twice before finding his voice. “That’s what you deserve.”

“So do you, Fitz.” Her fingers tightened around his. “And we already have each other. Honestly, you’re more than I ever really thought I would have. It makes it easier, being in tune with you.”

And harder, he thought, swallowing thickly. If they weren’t so in tune he might not have fallen in love with her to begin. But would he really trade being her friend and partner to avoid the heartbreak? Not in a million years. Placing his other hand over hers, he let it settle into the dips between her knuckles. “Yeah. At least we have each other.”

They sat like that for a few thudding beats—probably of the dance music, but equally likely of his heart—before he began to worry she would be able to feel his racing pulse and pulled away with a chuckle. “You’re awfully sentimental today, Simmons. All these weddings finally getting to you?”

Tucking her hair behind her ears, she gave him a heatless glare. “I believe sentimentality is encouraged at weddings? And don’t think I didn’t notice you tearing up during the dance, Dr. Fitz.”

“I’m not a heartless monster, Dr. Let-Me-Cut-Him-Open-A-Little-Bit.”

She sputtered indignantly. “Oh please, you _know_ that’s for—”

“—plenty of other ways to—”

“—and, actually, Sattler agreed—”

“—but no, straight for the scalpel—”

“—it worked out anyway.”

“—lucky nothing went wrong.”

She rolled her eyes dramatically and he grinned, infinitely relieved his self-preservation technique had worked. He only wanted to kiss Lab Partner Simmons 60 percent of the time. “So,” he said, “for both our sakes, can we make our escape early? Can’t have either of us turning into puddles of emotion.”

Standing, she shook out her skirt and picked her tiny purse off the table. “I was thinking _Ocean’s_.”

“Eleven?” he asked, sure to hide his satisfied smirk.

“Naturally. You know how I love young Matt Damon.”

“I do,” he said, allowing his hand to hover at the small of her back. “But who doesn’t, really.”

“Jerks,” she agreed, shivering as they left the room and were hit by an evening breeze off the river. Far smoother than he had ever been in his life, he whipped his jacket off and flung it over her shoulders. She snuggled into his collar and looked up at him gratefully. “Which neither of us are. In fact, Fitz, I think we’re the loveliest people we know.”

“At least one of us is,” he said, and when she threw her head back and laughed he let the sound blow away the lingering strains of a harmony he could never hope to have.


	4. The Fourth Movement

Jemma’s mum laughed like a boiling kettle, warm and rolling and full of the promise of something delightful to follow. Cupping her hands around her mostly-full mug, Jemma snuggled deeper into the kitchen window-seat with a contented smile spreading across her face and let the sound wash over her. It had been too long since she had been home to drink an early morning brew with her mother; she hadn’t realized how much she missed it. She was grateful they managed one before she and Fitz had to return to SciOps. Speaking of… She stretched to see the wall clock, not yet having put her watch on.

Her mother followed her gaze. “Not time yet, is it?”

“No, I’m only wondering if I should wake Fitz. Traveling makes him cross at the best of times; he’ll be a nightmare if he doesn’t have a proper breakfast first.”

“Darling.” Her mum set her mug to the side and reached out, brushing her fingers against the bare skin at Jemma’s ankle. “Before you do, will you allow me a rather personal question?”

“Asking questions is the only way to receive answers,” Jemma said lightly, tossing back one of their family’s mottos.

Her mother smiled briefly, a quick turn-up of her lips that didn’t reach her eyes. Jemma had just enough time to become conscious of the sudden flight of butterflies in her gut before they erupted into a full-blown frenzy at her mother’s question: “Do you know that Fitz is in love with you and choose to ignore it, or do you not know?”

Jemma started so sharply that tea sloshed over the rim of her mug into her lap, soaking into her pajama bottoms as she tried to catch her breath. “He—what—Mum—”

“I suppose that answers my question.”

Jemma hardly heard her over the ringing in her ears, a loud mind-numbing sound like church bells that entirely drowned out every other noise. “Fitz—no, Mum, he isn’t. He _can’t_ be.”

“Why not?” her mum asked as calmly as if she hadn’t just made a claim as preposterous as saying the sun orbited the earth. “You have the same key signature, the same time signature, the same tempo, and you’ve been joined at the hip for nearly half your lives. It would be far more surprising if he wasn’t.”

“Well, but—” She shook her head, setting her mug down next to her mum’s to avoid any more spilling and fisting her trembling hands. “He’s my best friend. I know him as well as my own cadenzas. Surely I would be able to tell if he was—if he did—if you were right.”

Covering Jemma’s hands with her own, her mother ducked to meet her eyes. “Sometimes these things happen when you aren’t paying attention and you don’t know for ages. He might not have known at first, either. He knows now, though. Poor boy carries it around like a double bass.”

“What evidence have you got?” Jemma whispered, hoping desperately there was none, that her mum was merely imagining things Jemma could easily explain away. The quietly peeping piccolo amidst her quick strings only signified her wish that this all be a silly mistake.

But her mother’s laugh boiled over, bouncing off the stone walls of the kitchen. “Have you watched him lately, sweet? His whole body leans your direction even if there’s a room separating you. He hangs on your every word and you can tell when you’re laughing because his face lights up. The resonance between you could fill the Royal Albert Hall all on its own.”

For a second, Jemma let the description play out like the moment of realization in a film: herself with a halo on her head from an impossible light source, laughing in slow motion; Fitz turning to look at her with something new in his eyes as the music swelled and, possibly, voiceover narration made the implicit blatant. Then she shook her head. Nothing like that had ever happened, nor would it. “He treats me the same as he’s always done, ever since we became friends at least. You don’t mean to suggest he’s been in love with me all this time and only just now realized it?”

“I don’t mean to suggest anything about what’s happened in the past; he’s the only person who can tell you that. I’m only asking about what’s happened in the present. What’s happening, rather.”

“Nothing,” she said, leaping to her feet and pacing into the kitchen proper as her tempo went from allegro to presto. “How could anything happen? I had no idea—I’m not even sure you’re right. And what would that mean if you were?”

“Well, I don’t know, darling. But it’s worth considering, surely.” Behind Jemma, the curtains rustled as her mother scooted to the edge of the seat. “You truly haven’t ever wondered if you and Fitz harmonize?”

“Oh, well, I—” She wrapped her arms around her waist tightly, trying to keep her song from dismantling her skeleton. Had she ever considered it? Not seriously. Not harmony. Tunefulness, yes of course, she thought about that gratefully all the time. And if “better than Beethoven” and “magnificent” had become the lyrics to her melody along with “best friend in the world”, that was only understandable. Of course Fitz liked her song! She clearly liked his without even hearing it, or they wouldn’t still be together after all these years. It didn’t signify soulmate harmonies. “He’s heard my song, though,” she said finally, turning to face her mother. “If he did—feel the way you suggest, why wouldn’t he say something? Why wouldn’t he ask me to listen to his?”

Her mum retrieved her tea and shrugged, eyebrows eloquent over the mug. “Asking questions is the only way to receive answers. And I’m not the best source of information.”

“You mean I should—”

“Ask, yes. What have you got to lose?”

Only everything, possibly, she thought.

The man in question stumbled in, knocking his hip against the counter as he peered through bleary eyes for the kettle. His hair ruffled up on one side, his bright-red monkey socks clashed horribly with his blue plaid pajamas, and pillow marks disappeared into his overnight stubble. He was utterly ridiculous and utterly wonderful, and Jemma couldn’t look away. “Morning,” he said, yawning, “if you can call it that at this hellish hour.”

Jemma’s mum greeted him cheerily, covering Jemma’s own somewhat distracted offering. “We didn’t expect you up for a bit,” she added, “Jemma was just wondering if she should come wake you.”

One hand on his hip, he plopped a tea bag into his mug before pouring steaming water over it. “Set alarms—in the plural—to be up in time. Didn’t want to mess up Simmons’ schedule. She gets a bit testy if her preparations go awry.” He turned and lifted the kettle in a silent question, shuffling over to refill her mother’s mug when she held it out to him. “I don’t know how you ever managed holidays with her.”

“Who do you think taught her preparation is key?”

Fitz returned the kettle to its cradle and leaned heavily against the edge of the countertop, all but burying his face in his tea to take a deep breath. “Who are you asking about what?”

“Zeller,” she blurted out, decidedly not looking at her mother, “about, er, moving Medina to the lab across the hall. I really don’t think I can work with him any longer without earplugs, which are, as you know—”

“Dangerous in some environments.” He nodded, still staring into the mug dozily. “Worth trying, I suppose. Course Balzan won’t thank you for it. Simmons, what time are we meant to be leaving? I have got time for a proper breakfast, haven’t I?”

The delicate beat passed in a bustle of toast and bacon and disappeared entirely in the hassle of international travel. Busy with ensuring they arrived at the airport with the appropriate amount of buffer time and all their important documents already filled out, Jemma managed to distract herself tolerably well, the only lingering hint of the morning’s conversation in the determined way her soul song looped gracefully through the bars in which the Academy flute was most prevalent. Fitz’s flute, if she allowed herself to be honest. Not that she had ever given it that name before, but its appearance coincided with the first moment she realized what his friendship meant to her; it could be nothing else but him. So there he was, piping his way through her soul—all right, but what did that mean? His inclusion in her song signified nothing about their ultimate ability to harmonize or, in fact, his feelings about her at all. There were too many melodic lines to this composition. She needed to look at the score.

About halfway through their flight, Fitz tapped her arm gently. She pulled out her headphones in the middle of a phrase and started unbuckling her seatbelt, expecting him to need a quick jaunt down the aisle, but he stopped her with another quick tap. “You weren’t talking about Zeller and Medina with your mum this morning, were you?”

Their decade-long habit of honesty kept her from another attempt at deflection. “No.”

He nodded, not surprised. “Was it something, erm, private? I don’t want to pry, but you looked upset. If I can help—”

“It _is_ private,” she said, “and I can’t talk about it yet. This isn’t the place, anyway.”

“Okay.” He looked down at the book in his lap, toying with the corner of a page. “Will you tell me about it when you can?”

“If I can. Yes.”

“All right.”

And then he dropped the subject entirely, not just for the flight but for the few weeks following their trip home when she worked fourteen-hour days trying to distract herself and spent the rest of the time watching him like a hawk for any signs of lovelorn behavior. Neither worked. For all her many hours pondering the subject and cataloging her observations, she could reach no conclusions. Fitz acted towards her exactly as he always did: equal parts brilliant and challenging in the lab, equal parts solicitous and obtuse at home. Perhaps a trifle more solicitous of late, she acknowledged, likely out of deference to her unusually frantic mood. More than once she dragged home at midnight to find her dinner warm in the oven and him sacked out on the sofa with two cooling mugs of tea on the coffee table. Each time, her heart beat accelerando for a bar or two, and she had to stop herself from kissing his forehead as she draped a blanket over him. But that was inconclusive, too; he behaved similarly on the rare occasions she was ill, and it was practically a biological imperative to feel protective of things one cared about when they were unconscious. It could mean anything.

The difficulty, she concluded one evening in the shower, arose from the fact that nearly everything either of them did could be explained several different ways. Without previous girlfriends or close friends as test cases, the data would logically support both platonic and romantic feelings. She had no way to ascertain the truth on her own. And thus, she had only to decide if she could comfortably live with the tension between not mucking up what they had and not knowing the truth for the rest of her life.

Her razor slipped against her shin, leaving an inch-long gash she hardly noticed. The rest of her life? She meant to be with Fitz for the rest of her life?

Yes, of course she did.

She always had, really, even from the Academy, always imagining herself with him rather than some nebulous soulmate. Which should have given her a clue right then, but _certainly_ should have sounded an alarm after he listened to her song and she responded by all-but abandoning the desire for anyone else. At the time she had seen it as the most practical decision, an embrace of herself in the way of modern, independent women. And perhaps it was that, to an extent. But would she have been so content with the choice if she hadn’t already had him to make her laugh and make her think and make her dinner, him to encourage and push and tease in her turn? She didn’t think so.

Whether that meant she loved him, she couldn’t say, but she rather thought it did mean they deserved the chance to find out. She finished her shower in a daze, towelling off and dressing to the accompaniment of her song _fortissimo_. She hardly ever remembered hearing it so loudly.

Fitz didn’t glance up from his video game when she came into the front room, her dripping hair leaving huge wet spots on the shoulders of her hoodie. “Almost through this level,” he said, “and then we can watch whatever you like. I think Nova’s on tonight.”

“Fitz?”

He did look up then, pausing the game as if by instinct and half-starting to his feet. “Simmons? Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice cracking in the middle.

“No,” he said, “you’re not. What is it? Something at the lab? Your parents?”

“No, nothing like that. It’s…” At a loss for words, she gestured to the sofa. “Can we sit down? There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

He swallowed visibly but sat without speaking, only the unconscious bouncing of his knee giving away his nerves. Perching beside him, she twisted her hands in her lap and took a deep breath. “I know I’ve been a bit...distracted since we got back from holiday. You must have been wondering why.”

“I thought you’d tell me when you wanted.”

“Yes,” she said, “I would. I will—that is, I’d like to do so, now. Er, you may have guessed it has something—well, everything, really, to do with what Mum and I were discussing that last morning when you came in. I’ve been trying to sort it since then and not having any luck, until just now when I decided that I—at least, um, what I needed to do about it.”

“Simmons,” Fitz said, his voice quivering even more than hers, “are you breaking up with me?”

Without meaning to, she laughed, her nerves spilling out high and shaky. “Breaking up with you? Fitz, how could we break up if we’ve never been together?”

“Well, you’re acting all, I don’t know—”

“No, Fitz, just the opposite! I want—I’m—Fitz, do we harmonize?”

His face went white as a sheet, eyes wide and terrified, breath quick through barely-parted lips. Something was wrong, very wrong, and she kept talking as though more words would drown out whatever she had said to make him look like that. “It’s just, Mum thinks you’re in love with me and I haven’t noticed, so I’ve been trying to gather evidence but the data is inconclusive and I just thought—well, you’ve heard me, so you know. So.” She closed her eyes and inhaled slowly. “Are you? Do we?”

The question exhaled, she opened her eyes to find Fitz huddled at the other end of the sofa, his face buried in his hands and his shoulders hunched up around his ears. She fluttered a hand over his shoulder, not certain if he needed comfort or space. “Fitz?”

“You weren’t supposed to know.”

She had to duck to hear his answer, but jerked back as soon as she did. “Not supposed to know? Why wouldn’t you tell me something like that? Fitz, if we’re soulmates—”

“We’re not.”

His words echoed into silence, a solo instrument suddenly sharp. Jemma felt her hands go cold. “We’re not? But then—and you aren’t in love with me?”

Dragging his hands down his face, he sucked in an unsteady breath before glancing her way, red-rimmed eyes betraying what had happened as he hid. “Those are two different questions, Jemma, and they’ve got two different answers.”

“Two different answers,” she repeated, still stunned. “We aren’t, but you—are?”

He shoved to his feet, pinching the bridge of his nose as he paced away from her. “I couldn’t help it, Jemma, I swear—I didn’t even know it until I heard your song—but we _aren’t_ soulmates. We don’t harmonize. And that’s why you weren’t supposed to know.”

“How is that possible?”

“No one ever said that you can only fall in love with your soulmate.”

“No, Fitz—” She stood and walked toward him, stopping just before arms-length. Wringing her hands to keep from reaching out to him, she fought to keep her voice even. “We’re so in tune, how can you know we’re not soulmates without playing us together? Unless you’ve snuck one of my recordings—”

“I would _never—”_

“Of course I know that! It was rhetorical.”

He shook his head, back still towards her. “I don’t have to, Jemma. It’s perfectly clear. There’s no way we could harmonize. None. At all.”

“I don’t believe you.” She pursed her lips, damming back the flood of words that wanted to spill out. His idiotic self-confidence, his high-handed protectiveness, his bloody-minded fatalism—whatever the reason, how _could_ he decide something like this without at least talking to her about it? “Fitz, that can’t be true.”

“Jemma!” He finally whirled around, and she almost wished he hadn’t. Mottled and hopeless, he looked nothing like her best friend; desperation left him a Fitz-shaped husk. “Do you think I haven’t wracked my brain for another way? Do you think I don’t lay awake at night wishing I was wrong? It’s all I’ve done for the last year!”

“But how do you _know_?”

He pressed his lips together, blowing out the space behind them in a mockery of a monkey, and strode past her with one finger up to hold her in place. She obeyed the silent request, taking the time to run her own hands over her face, breathe in and out a few times, and intentionally not think. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t listen to her song, because all she could hear was the flute—which was now an entire flute section screaming _Fitz Fitz Fitz_ with every blast—

“Here.”

He came up behind her and pressed his iPod into her hand, fumbling to pull the earphones up from the end of the dangling cord. “I can’t listen to it with you. I just—I can’t. But you listen to me and tell me if you think there’s a chance I’m wrong. If there is, I’m willing to give it a shot, anything, Jemma. I would—I can’t tell you how much I hope I’m wrong.”

She stuck the headphones in her ears—her headphones, which he must have retrieved from her bedroom—and held the player delicately. “Will you sit with me while I listen, at least? Like when you heard my song.”

He hesitated for a rest before gesturing to the sofa, waiting for her to sit and then settling as far from her as possible. She didn’t press her luck, instead letting her eyes drift shut before beginning the recording.

It hit her with the force of a train. All the bright brass she lacked, winds that swooped and dipped like birds, every note and phrase and stop and slur exactly the man she had been privileged to know for the last decade: shining and brave and true and clever and surprising and good. She had already listened to him for years and would happily do so for years to come. A few minutes in, she realized she was crying, overwhelmed by the experience of hearing her favorite song for the first time. “Fitz,” she breathed, reaching blindly for his hand. “You’re extraordinary.”

Sliding his hand out from under hers, he shook his head miserably. “Start it over. Play yours. You’ll see.”

She nodded, fully confident what she would hear. That must have been the problem before: he had to find his place in her and couldn’t sync them up. Odd, since he generally beat her at puzzles, but—

All her airy thoughts disappeared the instant the first chord struck, a harsh and abrasive cannon-shot to begin the barrage of cacophonous, atonal notes that made her want to clap her hands over her ears to block it out. She could hardly hear herself over him, and when she did her music fought with his and spoiled both their melody lines. Worse, it seemed as though he lagged a few bars behind her the whole way; every now and again she thought she heard an echo of something of hers in him, but they never came together. Not once. By the final, jagged chord, tears poured down her face for another reason entirely.

He tugged the headphones from her ears and took back his player, turning it over and over in his hands. “Am I wrong?”

Stunned into silence, she shook her head. He mirrored her, grim and glassy-eyed.

“And the thing is,” he said, “we can’t even try. We’ve chosen to be friends, but I don’t know how that would last if we tried to be something else and it fell to pieces—which it clearly would. I don’t want to lose you, Jemma. I can live with loving you as long as I don’t lose you.”

A fresh rush of tears choked her answer, and she only shook her head again.

He rubbed his hands over his face, then down the thighs of his jeans to dry them before getting to his feet. “I’m gonna—I think I need a bit. And you do too, probably. I’ll crash with Cameron for a few days, all right?”

“If you need to,” she said in a voice so small it could belong to a mouse.

She heard him go to his room, listened for the zips of his backpack, winced when he slammed the medicine cabinet shut after getting his toothbrush out. Then his shoes appeared in her line of vision, shifting uneasily from side to side. “A few days,” he said again. “I’ll come back then. Unless you say no, all right?”

“All right.”

A quarter rest became a whole rest became three bars of silence. Neither of them moved.

“It gets easier,” he said at last, then pressed a kiss to the crown of her head and was gone.


	5. The Fifth Movement

Through an impressive display of willpower, Fitz managed to avoid Jemma for three days. They didn’t even see each other in the lab, carrying out any necessary contact with a series of tersely worded emails (in which he typed and erased ‘I miss you’ a dozen times) and the gopher services of a variety of lab lackeys (who looked as though they expected him to explode at any minute). Sometime in the inky blackness between two and four a.m. the third night, Fitz realized this was the longest they’d gone without speaking in their whole relationship. No wonder he couldn’t get her out of his head. Every second not spent actively thinking about something else found its way back to her, the violins singing her name and her laugh, the clarinets reminding him of the first time he saw her at orientation, the trumpets boldly declaring the whole thing in vain. If he hadn’t been so practiced at living with the unspoken weight of his feelings it would have driven him crazy. Since he was, he worried far more about her. Maybe he shouldn’t have left her to process it alone, but he knew she needed privacy to come to terms with things, and having him constantly around wouldn’t help. Doing the right thing didn’t make it easier.

The afternoon of the fourth day, an email rolled into his inbox accompanied by a fanfare:

_Come home, please._

And he, entirely unable to deny her, closed up his projects early and stuffed cotton in his mental ears, not even detouring to pick up his things. He couldn’t, not with the questions blowing through his brain. Would she ask him to pack the rest of his things and leave? Would she act as though nothing had changed? Would she want to talk about it or just ignore the whole thing? He took the stairs four flights up to their flat, needing the time to brace himself for whatever was coming. For the first time in ten years he had absolutely no idea what to expect from her.

He fumbled his keys, all thumbs, cursing as he tried and missed the lock more than once before finally succeeding in opening it. Dropping his backpack recklessly on the carpet by the door, he allowed himself a measure to relish the smells of strong tea and the candle she bought at the farmer’s market in the spring and the faintest hints of lavender that seemed to cling to her person before going in search of her to learn if he would be allowed to keep them, or only the snatches of her song that seemed unlikely to ever leave him.

“Hi, Fitz.”

She stood at the end of the hall, offering an uneasy smile. He took a deep breath and gave her one of his own. “How’ve you been?”

“Pensive,” she said. “I, um—I’ve got tea. And something to run by you, if you’ll come in?”

He followed her silently, not at all surprised to find their matching Tardis mugs resting side-by-side on the coffee table. The other items occupying the space, however, did surprise him: a tidy stack of battered scores, several cassette tapes in a line, thin plastic jewel cases with dates neatly printed on their covers. “What’s all this?” he asked, stooping to run a finger over the top score. “Don’t think I’ve seen a cassette tape in ten years.”

“They’re mine,” she said from behind him. “Those are all the versions of my song I have in physical form. The digital recordings have their scores in the stack there.”

He pulled his hand back as if burned. “Ah. I didn’t mean—”

“Fitz.” She sounded exasperated and not a little tired. “Do you think they would just be sitting out if I didn’t want you to look at them?”

“Guess not,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets all the same.

Sighing heavily, she indicated that he should take a seat, all but pushing his mug into his hands. Rather than take her own, though, she knelt on the other side of the coffee table and picked at the sleeves of her cardigan. “I’ve been listening to them almost constantly the last few days—each of them, one after the other, hoping that they’ll bring me clarity. My song always has. I listen to it and I know who I am and what I’m meant to be doing. And if it doesn’t work, I go have a new recording made, and that solves the problem. I had a new recording made this morning, Fitz. I called in sick to have a new recording made, and I’ve been listening to it on a loop ever since.”

“Did it work?” he croaked.

Rather than answer, she canted her head to one side and reached for the first tape, pulling it toward her with her finger in one of the holes. “This is my first one. It’s very simple. Well, I was only three, so it’s astonishing that I managed one at all.”

One corner of his mouth twisted up of its own volition, delighted at the image. “Always the overachiever.”

“How old were you for your first recording, then?”

“Three and a half.”

“Well.” She took it from the table and held it in both hands, slowly turning it over and over. “There’s violins, mostly, but it’s already allegro, already 6/8. Apparently I was myself from a very young age.” Setting it back into place tenderly, she indicated another cassette. “This was when I went to university. All the instruments are there, but not the trills and cadenzas. That’s in this one”—she tapped the first of the cds—“which is the one I graduated with, and had all through my doctorates, and in my first year at the Academy.”

“An important version,” he said, watching her open the case and spin the disc round and round with one finger.

“Yes.”

Then, so quickly he almost didn’t see her move, she snatched the cd out of the case and snapped it in half. He cried out sharply, reaching out too late to stop her. “Jemma, what the—”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said fiercely, “because the next recording has you in it. And the one after that has you more, and the next more, until the one made today has you beneath every note. Soul songs can change, Fitz, and mine has become wrapped up with you, and I didn’t even notice until just now because I’m still completely myself. Look.” And, shoving the remaining tapes and cds to the ground, she pulled three scores at random from the stack and opened them to the same page near the middle. “ _Look_ , Fitz.”

He got to his knees dazedly, setting his tea to the side. Musical notation blurred before his eyes, but he followed her finger like a beacon as it swept over the staffs. As his vision cleared, he saw what she meant: the melody from the earliest score repeated in the others, but the dynamics changed, and the quarter rests became half rests, and a second, supporting thorough line appeared in the treble clef. Gingerly touching a whole note with the strange square mark of an accidental in front of it, he didn’t dare look up at her. “Is this me?”

“Yes,” she said with tears in her voice. “The first time I heard it, I thought it must have always been there because it fit so perfectly. _You_ fit so perfectly.”

Spreading his palm flat across her score, he closed his eyes to hold back his own tears. His violin sang out her theme as he said, “But I don’t, Jemma. You know I don’t fit.”

“That’s what I’m saying, Fitz.” She took his hand in both of hers, her fingernails digging into his palm, her thumbs smoothing across the back. “You’re already in my song. And if songs can change, well, why can’t we change ours so they harmonize?”

The violins held to a quivering, expectant hum, and his breath caught in his throat. “Can anyone?”

Her fingers hesitated in their sure movements, giving him all the answer he needed. She would have done the research, of course, examined every possibility, just as he had in his turn. It was foolish to think anything had changed in the last year. Huffing a mirthless laugh, he made to pull away.

She didn’t let him. Tightening her hold, she brought one hand to his cheek and forced him to meet her boundless, certain eyes, bright with determination he knew from long experience would not accept failure. “I don’t care if it’s never been done before. You and I do brand-new, impossible things all the time. We can do this too.”

Without speaking, he turned his hand in her grasp to clasp hers, wrapping his fingers around her tiny wrist to find her heart beating _allegro vivace_. It was all he could manage. Leave it to her, he thought, to refuse to submit to what anyone else would deem a hopeless situation; only she would believe they could force their will upon what everyone else assumed were unbreakable laws. And leave it to him to agree. She had written her way into every single bar of his song, too, with her intelligence and kindness and pragmatism and beauty, and made him richer just by being his friend. If they could pull this off— _when_ they did, because she was right, they did impossible things at least once a week—their song would be better than anything ever written in the history of soulmates. He wanted to laugh, but it would probably come out in a sob. Instead, he pinched the bridge of his nose and sucked in as much air as possible, hunting for the right words.

“Unless,” she said, and dropped the hand that caressed his face. “Unless you don’t want to try. In which case we can keep on as we are—”

Tightening his grip, he used one hand to push himself to his feet and tugged her up with the other, taking her other wrist to pull her so the coffee table was no longer between them. His thumbs caressed the soft skin over her pulse as gently as though she was a Stradivarius, tucking them between his close to his equally rapid heart. “The thing is,” he said, “this is a bit of a _da capo_ , because I cannot think of a single, solitary thing to say. It’s the Academy all over again.”

She grinned, ducking her forehead against his. “Well, I always had plenty to say, so that’s all right.”

Her eyes were the deep, slow strokes of a cello from this distance, shimmering and steady, and his song roared in his ears, but he didn’t need to hear or speak to ask the question, and she didn’t need him to to give her answer. Pushing up on her toes, she twisted her hands around the points of his collar and brought her lips to his with all the surety of a virtuoso putting a bow to the strings, confident that her scrapes and slides would sound exactly as she wanted them to. Was her raspberry lip gloss the rosin, then? he wondered briefly, and then she was kissing him and he was kissing her and it was like the 1812 Overture and the loudest, most raucous pop song imaginable and the Ode to Joy all at once, like that moment at the end of a musical’s first act when the cast stops singing their different themes to come together in unison and your heart nearly beats out of your chest because you can’t bear how beautiful it is. Fitz stopped thinking entirely, too enraptured by the sound of her sighs and the feel of her skin against his to worry about anything else; at this moment, the trumpets sounded like a victory march.

Some time later—who knew how much time, for all Fitz knew or cared you could have played the entirety of _Cosi fan tutte_ twice—after they realized they were smiling too much to kiss any longer and had come to rest, arms and legs twined, on the sofa, she adjusted her head on his chest just enough to meet his gaze. “You know what we ought to do?”

“Kiss more?” he suggested, and she obliged quickly before continuing.

“We ought to play our songs together. Just to hear how much work we have to do.”

He groaned dramatically, letting his head fall against the back of the couch. “Jemma, everything is perfect right now. Why do you want to muck it up by reminding us that we’re stubbornly flouting millennia of soulmate knowledge?”

“It will still be perfect,” she promised, “because we’re going to make it perfect. Come on, Fitz. Knowledge is power!”

“I cannot believe you just said that.”

But he reluctantly unwrapped one arm from around her to burrow into his pocket after his player. She did the same in the pocket of her cardigan, pulling it out and jerking her headphones from the jack. “On three?”

“Yup.” Scrolling to his song, he began the count: “one, two, three!” and pressed play. The trumpets blared their fanfare.

“Ugh, Fitz!” She dropped her still-silent player on the ground, shooting him a glare. “I wasn’t ready. When have we ever pressed play on ‘three’, anyway? It’s always on ‘go’.”

Not willing to let her go far enough to retrieve it, he used his marginally longer arms to scrape the carpet. His fingertips barely brushed the tiny rectangle, but it was enough to start her song. “Oh, crap. Can’t quite reach—Simmons, that’s patently ridiculous. If you say ‘on three’ you begin _on_ three.”

“Fitz, be quiet.”

The thing between two fingers, he had a retort ready until he saw her face. All the color he had kissed into it had vanished entirely; he would have been afraid if he hadn’t seen a light dawning in her eyes. “Jemma?”

“Fitz, be _quiet_. Can’t you hear it?”

“Hear what? I certainly don’t want to hear the disaster that’s our songs—”

She smacked her hand over his mouth hard enough to smart, though he doubted she meant to do it and would simply require her ministrations at a later time. “That’s just it! Fitz, what disaster?”

Sure enough, a minute’s quiet listening revealed not dissonant chords or cacophonous clashes, but a composition with no fewer than three melodic lines twisting their deft courses around and through each other, balanced and harmonious and electrifying. Strings and horns and percussion and winds—all kept perfect time, each taking their turn to come to the foreground and stepping off, all playing their part to perfection. But that was—no. It couldn’t be. “Jemma,” he breathed, and she nodded, just as astounded. He shook his head. “You are hearing this, aren’t you? It’s not just, I don’t know, a hallucination? Or a dream, it could be a dream—if there was a monkey we’d know for sure—”

“Ugh, Fitz!”

“I just think we have to consider all the alternatives.”

“I hear it too. Fitz, you don’t think—”

He glanced down at the two players in his hands, certain his must have stopped playing. Where were the obnoxious brasses drowning out her delicate strings? But the screen continued to count out the seconds, his just a few before hers, and when he checked the volume both devices had the same settings. And, if he concentrated, he could pick out his notes and separate them from hers, fully aware that the brass was all him and the strings all her—except her theme winding its way through both their parts, now combined with the flute that matched his melody in her score. “Counterpoint,” he said, staring at the incontrovertible truth without being able to believe it. “Our soul songs are in counterpoint.”

Laughing, she grabbed him and pressed a giddy, gleeful kiss to his cheek. “Oh, Fitz, of course we couldn’t harmonize, we were never meant to—we’re not harmonic, we’re polyphonic! Who would want a relationship where one person is doomed to play second fiddle? I’d much rather have a partnership.” Wrapping her arms around his neck, she rested her forehead against his temple with wonder ringing through her voice. “A line for you, a line for me, and one that’s both of us, each equal and brilliant apart, a hundred times better together. Fitz, why didn’t we guess before? What else would we be? What else have we ever been?”

Nothing, he thought, from the very first moment they were polyphonic in practice, but this was— “I didn’t think soulmate counterpoint was even real. I thought it was just something they made up in horrible films because no one can believe Bach was that clever.”

She untangled herself enough to face him directly, eyes now a full-blown sunrise to the accompaniment of a french horn. “It had to be true for someone sometime, or we wouldn’t have the stories. And why not us? Goodness knows we’re exceptional in every other way.”

“Maybe not say that around other people.”

“But it’s true.” She took his face between her hands, as serious as she could manage when her smile looked ready to go winging off her face. “You were already my best friend and favorite song, and now we’re soulmates too? I wouldn’t believe it if it wasn’t so perfect. Just listen to us, Fitz.”

He closed his eyes and let the music wash over him. Already, he had a hard time extracting the song he had lived with all his life from the one that had been formed by their conjunction, barely remembering what his clarinets and flutes sounded like without her violas and basses—and why would he want to, when she made him better and richer and fuller? Fitz didn’t think he would ever be able to hear himself without hearing her, not as long as he lived. And he didn’t mind one bit.

“Listen to us,” he repeated, and kissed her again.


End file.
